Earlier this week, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump summoned hundreds of military commanders to Quantico to hear speeches. The two men talked for a couple of hours, and they had a lot to say.

Hegseth talked about physical training standards, and less sexual-harassment investigation, and grooming standards that just coincidentally bar women and at least some black men from combat, and anti-woke, and how “unity is our strength,” and the “Liberation Day” tariffs, and a few other things.

Trump, coming afterward and jokingly complaining about having to follow such “a great speech,” talked about his “Gulf of America” spat with the Associated Press, and all the wars he claims to have ended, and how untrackable submarines are, and how bad Joe Biden’s signature looked when he wasn’t using an autopen, and how China and Russia might be catching up to us on military tech, and firefighters being shot off of their ladders in the “inner cities” (citation needed), and how he despairs of ever getting a Nobel Prize, and how much he loves the word “tariffs,” and I probably missed a few things while skimming over the transcript because goddamn does he ramble.

They also said something else. First Hegseth:

But when civilian leaders issue lawful orders, we execute.

We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.

So military officers should be totally obedient to Trump, and they should also be as sloppy as they feel like being in combat; there will be no namby-pamby wishy-washy self-restraint in the name of keeping noncombatant casualties down. And terror tactics are explicitly endorsed (even more than usual) against “the enemies of our country.”

Then Trump named the enemy, sort of:

America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform, you can take them out. These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within.

…we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city, with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.

…the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live.

Even after rereading it a couple of times, I’m not sure whether the Assclown wants to declare war (not ideological conflict or even War on Drugs-style thuggery, but actual boots-on-the-ground, bombers-overhead, toss-a-grenade-through-the-door-to-clear-a-room military force) on all suspected immigrants in America or on all his political opponents and naysayers, but either way, fuck that.

And of course Secretary Roofie will cheerfully help, to the best of his ability. Without the Assclown, he’d still be a second-stringer on TV.

But the speeches were so full of other shit, of varying intensities of stench, that bootlicking righties can pretend that anyone criticizing any part of it is “defending fat generals” or “beardos” or objecting to gender-neutral standards.

This isn’t quite the same kind of “strategic equivocation” that Scott Alexander called out some social-justice types for abusing eleven years ago, but it works much the same in practice, and it’s just as dishonest.